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Sarah Kane's Postdramatic Strategies in Blasted Uluslararası Sosyal Aratırmalar Dergisi The Journal of International Social Research Cilt: 4 Sayı: 17 Volume: 4 Issue: 17 Bahar 2011 Spring 2011 SARAH KANE’S POSTDRAMATIC STRATEGIES IN BLASTED, CLEANSED AND CRAVE Ahmet Gökhan BÇER∗ Abstract After her unexpected death in 1999 there have been scholarly and theatrical interests in Kaneian drama. In this process Sarah Kane’s texts have been performed all over the world. Many articles, books and book chapters have been published about her texts which handle the issues such as violence, trauma, depression, repression, torture, madness, death, love, and apocalypse in the light of Artaudian, Bondian, Beckettian, Pinteresque readings and her experiential theatre. But there is one crucial point missing: Kane’s theatre is totally a postdramatic one as Hans-Thies Lehmann characterizes. The aim of this paper is to discuss postdramatic theatricality of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Cleansed and Crave. Key Words: British Theatre, Blasted, Cleansed, Crave, Postdramatic Theatre, Sarah Kane. Increasingly, I’m finding performance much more than acting; theatre more compelling than plays. Unusually for me, I’m encouraging my friends to see my play Crave before reading it, because I think of it more as text for performance than as a play.∗∗ Sarah Kane 1990s has been generally regarded as one of the most exciting decades for English theatre since the first performance of John Osborne’s masterpiece Look Back in Anger (1956). Thanks to the plays of a handful of playwrights such as Martin Crimp, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and Anthony Neilson, the course of British theatre heralded the beginning of a new theatrical renaissance. In the wake of new plays of those writers, British theatre of the 1990s has witnessed the rise of a new angry young generation whose works have been labelled provocative, speculative, confrontational, sensational, shocking, taboo-breaking, brutal, bleak, gloomy and dark. These writers have a contemporary voice that speaks to young people which portrays a composite picture of British society and market culture. Of those writers, contributing ∗ Assist. Prof. Dr. Ordu University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Foreign Languages, Ordu, TURKEY. ∗∗ Sarah Kane, “Drama with Balls”, Guardian, 20 August 1998. - 76 - to (a)political drama in the 1990s, Sarah Kane emerged as one of the most influential figures, purveying an experiential theatre with deeply shocking images. Born in Brentwood in 1971 and commit suicide on 20 February 1999 at the age of 28, Sarah Kane made innovative and important contributions to British theatre flavoured with her philosophical background. Since her emergence in 1995 with Blasted, Sarah Kane has become a leading figure in the British new writing scene of the new millennium. Between 1995 and 1999 Kane wrote five plays and a short film for BBC. Her texts deal with themes of destructive love, sexual craving, pain, physical and psychological dimensions of cruelty, issues of distress, melancholia and death. By examining these specific topics she questions and breaks down the established notions of audiences. In these texts Kane attempts to explore the possibility of change acknowledging that the world is violent. While handling these issues in the light of In-Yer-Face theatre sensibility she uses the techniques of postdramatic theatre which was established by German theatre researcher Hans-Thies Lehmann. In his book of Postdramatic Theatre Lehmann methodically explores the tradition of drama from Aristotle’s Poetics to current experiential drama of contemporary playwrights. Postdramatic theatre is for Lehmann beyond the boundaries of traditional drama. It rejects dramatic notions such as illusion, mimesis and mimetic representation, catharsis, characterization and primacy of character, a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end of well made plays. In theatre, Sarah Kane uses postdramatic aspects as a form of representation to challenge audiences. Cleansing and breaking down the traditional dramatic methods of classical dramaturgy such as linear sequence of time, creating definitive characters whose names, genders are stated, and recognizable plot; three unities of time, place and action, cause and effect connection; using media images on stage, musicalization, playing with the density of signs, non-hierarchy, physicality, interruption of the real Kane’s texts demonstrates how the postdramatic aesthetics can be experimented with onstage. Using Lehmann’s book as a guide this paper analyzes how Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Cleansed, and Crave exercise the postdramatic theatrical signs to shape their contents by using the aspects of text, time, media images, and postdramatic pain and catharsis. Kane is a true explorer, who breaks form and content. With her five different plays in style and content, she clearly draws a picture of the contemporary societies by portraying x rays of their violent and violated souls. Sarah Kane’s plays thrive in a theatrical climate which is conductive to ‘post-dramatic’ theatrical forms and theories” and “her work is ‘anathematic’ to the notion of dramatic theatre” (Voigts-Virchow, 2010: 196-167). Kane’s first text Blasted that rocked the stages and sparked legendary controversy is first performed at Royal Court Theatre in 1995. In Blasted Sarah Kane self consciously tries to depict the traumas of war, rape, domestic violence and loss. Using the Bosnian war of the early 1990s as a central motivation, she tried to show the catastrophic images of bombings, pain, torture, hunger and mutilation, inhumanity, sexual violence, abuse, and rape that define war. As Saunders summarizes, the play begins with the exploration of an abusive relationship between Ian, a middle aged tabloid journalist who has brought Cate, a much younger former girlfriend to a Leeds hotel room. Ian has organised the meeting for the purposes of seduction, yet despite Cate’s protestations their night together culminates in Ian subjecting her to a sexual assault. After Cate escapes through the - 77 - bathroom window, Blasted changes radically in style with the entrance of a nameless Soldier. The room is hit by a mortar bomb and, as both men recover, the Soldier tells Ian of the atrocities he has committed in a civil war that have broken out. We are now no longer sure whether the location is Leeds or elsewhere in the world. The encounter between the pair culminates in the Soldier raping and blinding Ian after which he kills himself. Cate, later returns with a baby that has been entrusted to her care. Although the child passes away Cate buries it and prays for its safe keeping in the afterlife. Ian is left alone again and time itself breaks down. While whole season pass, Ian carries out an increasingly bizarre series of acts that culminates in him eating the buried baby and occupying its makeshift grave. The play ends with Cate returning and feeding Ian with bread, sausage and gin with his final words ‘thank you’ (Saunders, 2009: 16-17). Blasted shows one of its postdramatic theatrical signs with the bombing scene. Because after the bomb blasted the hotel wall the place of the play changes into a civil war and rape camps in Bosnia. Breaking down the traditional theatrical methods of classical dramaturgy such as linear sequence of time and three unities of time, place and action this scene represents the postdramatic aesthetics of time. Sarah Kane emphasizes these postdramatic stylistic traits of Blasted in an interview with Dan Rebellato as follows: Formally, I’m trying to collapse a few boundaries as well. To carry on with making the form and content one. That’s proving extremely difficult…What I have to do is keep the same place but alter the time and action. Or you can actually reverse it and look at it the other way around: that the time and place stay the same, no the time and the action stay the same, but the place changes. I depends actually how you look at the play... For me the form did exactly mirror the content. And for me the form is the meaning of the play, which is that people’s lives are thrown into complete chaos with absolutely no warning whatsoever. (Rebellato, 1998) In postdramatic theatre it becomes a rule to scrap the conventionalized perception of time which is essential to dramatic theatre. For Lehmann drama brings logic and structure into the confusing plethora and chaos of being – this is why, for Aristotle, it has a higher status than historiography, which only reports the chaotic events. It is basically the unity of time that has to support the unity of this logic that is meant to manage without confusion, digression and rupture. One aspect of this notion of the unity of time, that remains only implicit in Aristotle, is this: to the same degree as time and action attain an internal coherence, seamless continuity and totality of surveyability, this same unity draws a distinct line between drama and the external world. It safeguards the closed structure of tragedy (Lehmann, 2006: 160). Another postdramatic stylistic trait of Blasted is its rape scenes as a means of staging postdramatic pain and catharsis. Addressing the issue of rape in Blasted Sarah Kane shows violated women bodies in pain dialectically. In the first scene of the play the rape was, as usual, male to female. Here Ian has raped Cate during the night. But the second rape was, unusually, male to male. The Soldier raped Ian, sucked out his eyes because the soldiers in the war raped her girlfriend Col. Blasted inserts radical tones to the traditional image of rape, searching the question of rape’s representability, linking verbal and visual representation, as well as pushing the boundaries by visually staging a male on male rape. In Blasted, almost certainly for the first time in the history of theatre, the spectators have to deal with the rapes of both man and woman at the same time in the same story.
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